Piotr Uklanski’s Kodak Moment

For art-world denizens of a certain age, the Polish artist Piotr Uklański’s most significant work will always be the light-up dance floor at Passerby, the defunct bar on West Fifteenth Street owned by his former dealer Gavin Brown. The dance floor was both a mockery of Minimalism’s recession into the decorative arts and a bona-fide place to boogie. In Uklański’s photographs, too, the irony-sincerity toggle is flipped so frequently that it may as well be out of order. At the Met, where the survey “Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs” opened on March 17th, the Great Hall features a pair of banners that update the Eastern European tradition of mass photography: thousands of Polish soldiers in red and white cohere on the docks of Gdańńsk to form the logo of Solidarity, then disperse in a dozen directions, aimless and atomized. Most of the exhibition’s photographs come from “The Joy of Photography,” a series inspired by Eastman Kodak’s cheery guidebook of the same name. The intensely colored analog images (a gushing waterfall, flowers in blossom) display a love of obsolescent photographic techniques that pushes Uklański’s art past charade. Whether his layers of meaning are clear to viewers is a different question. On a recent visit, many museumgoers paused in front of “Untitled (Yellow Sky),” a wildly kitschy photograph of a setting sun, from 2000, snapping it with their smartphones.

“Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum through August 16th. A companion exhibition, “Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Selects from the Met Collection,” is on view through June 14th.